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Comment by toenail | Hacker News Reader

Interesting guide. I wasn't aware Wayland still had such shortcomings even for graphics professionals.

> It's now up to each desktop environment project (e.g. GNOME or KDE Plasma) to develop their own full featured GUI for tablet configuration.

That doesn't sound ideal.

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Everything is outsourced to the compositor. It's insane. Same reason there's no xbindkeys for Wayland - every compositor needs to implement their own version of it. Every compositor needs their own screen reader and accessibility software as well. All in the name of preventing mythical attack surface (people write exploits to give themselves arbitrary code execution, not for the ability to read window contents or whatever Wayland is supposed to prevent).

Isn't screen reader support implemented using AT-SPI over D-Bus? So I would expect it to be independent of the window system.

On https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Accessibility/AT-SPI2/ it even says:

> Wayland

> Works just the same :D

Apart from that while it's true that the compositor has to do everything, some of the interfaces seem to be shared (standardized? I don't know enough about Wayland development tbh) across different compositors: https://wayland.app/protocols/

That part is not so much about security: it would be entirely possible to make a secure standard protocol for such things, it's just there's enough highly opinionated people involved that no-one can agree and they each do their own thing.

Wayland also doesn't have a video capture interface as part of the standard. E.G. for Remote Desktop style applications (you might even use such if part of a video conference). Instead that's left up to the compositors, and therefore potentially not supported or possibly every compositor could have their own standard.

https://wayland.freedesktop.org/faq.html#heading_toc_j_8

Many compositors use the xdg portal standard. Go figure.

Yup, most common multi-platform remote control tools (AnyDesk, Teamviewer, etc) simply don't work if you're running Wayland. Major PITA if you're doing some form of tech support...

I had to switch back to X11 because both nVidia and nouveau would produce around 5 fps on my A2000 RTX on multiple distros. This is just for basic usage, not even painting-related.

Way-not-gonna-land as someone said some years ago. :-P I'm using Wayland for my work now for two years now, and it has been amazing. But then, I rarely do any graphics work.

I would like to move back to Linux (specifically NixOS), but I've held back because support on the T2 Macs is pretty bad still, and Apple is still providing updates to them for now.

When I tried installing Linux on there, I had a ton of trouble getting Wayland to work in any capacity (it was very glitchy when I tried), and I had to go back to X, before nuking the Linux install and going back to macOS.

did you have any problems specifically with X? It's worked flawlessly for my entire adult life, and a decade ago they made it so magical I didn't even have to write a config anymore. I think they will have to pry X from my cold dead silicon at this point.

No, not really, I just wanted to play with the shiny new Wayland stuff. Also I like the Sway window manager, I think more than i3? Obviously they're both pretty comparable.

>did you have any problems specifically with X?

Every recent time I would daily drive Linux (Ubuntu and Antix) I had screen tearing out of the box. Not really an acceptable feature.

that's interesting, what graphics card were you using? was it some fancy monitor? I have always used pretty standard stuff and never had any problems.

>what graphics card were you using? was it some fancy monitor?

3 year old Lenovo laptop with Intel Integrated plus Nvidia dedicated on Ubuntu connected to external HDMI and Displayport standard 1080p monitors and built in laptop monitor, and an old PC with old dedicated Nvidia on AntiX(Debian) connected to old 17" VGA LCD monitor. Nothing fancy. Screen tearing on all of them.

were you using the nvidia proprietary drivers?

I think Nuveau on both or whatever came out of the box during install. Tried to install the Nvidia propetary but couldn't due to some MoK signing issues.

Anyway, the out of the box experience is shit on this front. Screen tearing shouldn't be a thing anymore. It's not like those GPUs were some exotic prototype HW nobody else has to need hours of reding forums and tinkering with .conf files to get rid fo screen tearing.

1) Nvidia's just bad on Linux because Nvidia doesn't give a shit about open source support, or about doing things the way the open source folks do. And while the Nouveau driver is an amazing technical feat, it's also amazing any time it actually works, given that it's totally reverse-engineered with effectively zero help from Nvidia.

2) If I were using a batteries-included distro,

  Section "Device"
    Identifier "AMD"
    Driver "amdgpu"
    Option "TearFree" "on"
    Option "VariableRefresh" "on"
  EndSection

would have been dumped into '/etc/X11/xorg.conf.d' for me. But because I'm using Gentoo, I had to do it myself. Not a big burden.

absolutely love the Linux culture of "don't screw it up: true":

> Option "TearFree" "on"

reminds me of a pdf viewer at some point had an option to "respect permission" or something, you could turn it off and ignore the limits on the pdf that the author set.

> reminds me of a pdf viewer at some point had an option to "respect permission" or something

Oh yeah, I always say "Don't respect" on PDF readers that have that setting. It's a very nice setting.

In regards to "TearFree" not being on by default, I expect that there's a good reason for it... maybe it adds some amount of latency (whether on hardware I don't have, or so little latency that I don't notice it), or maybe it just flat-out doesn't work right on some hardware that I happen to not have.

Regardless, deciding whether or not to set those settings is the job of one's distro.

ah fair enough, I've never bothered with secure boot, my laptop is from 2012. nvidia is usually a pain, but I've never really had a problem once the proprietary driver was installed. I thought Ubuntu made that easier.

Just go to github and search issues with 'Wayland support'

I think is more probable that anyone will have a problem in Wayland than X

As much as the "Wayland is now ready since it's the default on big distros" meme goes, it's not really ready if you're having issues with it.

Ready means if everything is flawless to MacOS/Windows levels, where you never have to think about display server compatibility, and that's where X11 is still king despite the performance shortcomings. At least it always just works™ and compatibility beats performance most of the days.

That feels like a high bar for FOSS (maybe for any software...), but given how long Wayland has been getting worked on, you'd hope it's at least usable for most (but not digital painters, apparently).

Keep in mind Wayland has been worked on since 2008 when I was still in school. I think some young HN readers haven't even been born yet.

I could excuse it if it had been 4 years old or so, but it's old enough already it can drink and smoke in Europe.

Wayland is now way older than Xorg was when they decided that it needed re-inventing.

Fun fact, GTA Vice City is now further away (22 years) from its 2002 launch date than it was from its story setting of 1986 (16 years).

If that game were to be launched today and feature a setting in the same time delta, it would be set in 2008 when movies like The Dark Knight or the first Iron Man launched.

How time flies.

I remember the nineties when 30 years ago was the 60s. now 30 years ago is my flipping childhood.

So when you were a child, a 1969 Mustang was a "clasic car", but now an equivalent classic car would be a fourth gen Honda Civic that your local weed dealer drives.

thank goodness I don't know what any of that means, I was never into cars!

Maybe more a Camero IROC-Z?

Wayland was first released in 2008, so it's 15 years old.

Xorg was a fork of XFree86, which was released in 1991. So that codebase was 17 years old when Wayland was first released. I don't think the date of the fork is what's relevant here.

I could also argue that you should be comparing the Wayland protocol (2008) vs the X11 protocol (1987), or even older versions of X (1984).

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